This plugin records which user actually published a post, which in a multi-author environment may not always be the original post author. This helps to maintain accountability for who was ultimately responsible for a post appearing live on a site.

The admin listing of posts is amended with a new "Published By" column that shows the name of the person who published the post (for those posts that have actually been published).

For posts that were published prior to the use of this plugin (and thus the plugin could not directly record who published those posts), the plugin makes a best guess attempt to ascertain who published the post. After failing to find the publisher of the post as recorded by the plugin, it checks for who last edited the post, then who is responsible for the latest revision of the post, and finally failing those, it assumes it was the post author. If you'd rather the plugin not make an attempt to guess the publisher, you can disable the checks by including this snippet in your theme's functions.php (or, ideally, a site-specific mu-plugin):